Category Archives: Design

And you thought I might be talking about an old rock group. Nope. Just in case you didn’t get enough of a workout trying to figure out which window options were going to be best, here’s your chance to think about doors, too. Three entry doors need to have decisions made about their surrounding frame. We’re not even talking about the actual door itself yet, just the way we finish the hole. And yet…this too is important.

Door number one is the main entrance. Door number two is right beside it, and leads to the old torre (which will remain a garden shed at ground level). Door number three we’re not even looking at yet, because it’s the one off the kitchen. Yes, it’s that one that used to have a bathroom attached until Marcia became a demon with a sledgehammer and removed the room. We’ll deal with that later.

The main entrance (middle), with the shed/torre entrance to its left.

The shed doorframe magically holds together with very little mortar, like old teeth you expect might pop from their gums at any moment.

The main door. Those slabs of stone at the sides used to constitute the frame, but on their skinny edges (you can see it in the top photo, where they are still intact). They fell out, and revealed a nice curve at the top. I like the width of them the way I’ve set them on either side here to check proportion.

Now for some examples of what other people have done with their doors, to see how confused we can all get.

The width of this surround gives the door a great presence and balances it. I like the roughness of the old stone, which looks like it’s seen a thing or two. Beautiful, subtle details in the little groove and the rounding of the inner edge, as well as the wedge in the centre of the lintel section.

Another door with the edge detail.

This place, showing off again (it’s in Varese Ligure). The lintel shape is similar to Godzillavilla’s with that slight curve, but our doors have a more stout proportion (dare I say short and wide?). The wedge detail looks good here, too.

A rough stone frame, also on the thinner side. I know people say one can never be too thin (or too rich), but I’m not sure the rule applies to door frames. Might work for the shed.

And last but not least – although a little too rustic for the main entry, this has gobs of charm for the shed. Its framing stones are ten times the size of our shed’s puny little old-man-teeth stones. We do have plenty of larger chunks on the property if we wanted to remake it, though.

That’s it! Comments, please. Someday we will even get to agonize over what kind of doors go inside these lovely holes we’re working on.

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Just in case you need more photos, here are the windows Luca was talking about in his comment on yesterday’s Windows and Shutters post. They’re from his own place, which he and Friederike painstakingly restored from a gaping void into a beautiful home.

The windows have a nice, soft finish – not too WHITE – and the wood sill brings extra warmth to the look.

It’s important to think about how they look when open, since the outer finish then ‘enters’ the room.

Head-on effect. It’s hard to tell from these shots, but the walls are a much deeper, natural colour than the white windows. So it’s not just a sea of whiteness.

Their house has stucco over the stone, but you can see how they appear on the outside. The window openings are actually a lot like Godzillavilla; very simple.

So there you go. This is Luca’s vote. Any other comments the rest of you would like to add, feel free to confuse me further!

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Not that we actually need to make this decision yet, but it’s never too early to fantasize. This week’s fantasy is finished windows to go in those lovely holes that are waiting for them. The question is window colour and – even further down the road – shutter colour.

We have some restrictions on our house due to its age and the area we’re in, but that’s fine by me. The choices for the windows are essentially white or wood. The shutters can be green, wood, or brown.

White windows can look nice and fresh against a mass of stone – although I think the brown shutters distract from that effect. I’m not a big fan of brown shutters.

Classic wood window with green shutters. The green does seem to balance all that natural tone quite nicely.

But then – even with a house that’s shut up – wood shutters are so subtle against stone. This is why I flip-flop about it so much.

This is a terrible shot, but you get to see wood versus green shutters together.

And I throw this in only to show the practicality of having shutters of classic Ligurian construction; they open in multiple partial configurations, like transformers, so you always get just the right mix of breeze and light. Ingenious.